Aftermath
by PragmaticHominid
Summary: Post X2 AU, in which Erik successful uses Charles and Cerebro as tool of genocide. In the aftermath, there's a desperate need to find a planet'sworth of orphaned Mutant children. This brings Erik to the mansion. Charles is not happy to see him.
1. Chapter 1

**I.**

Erik Lehnsherr did not pause to considered the ramifications of his actions in full.

It was not fear, exactly, which seized him when he realized that Stryker intended to use Charles and the counterfeit Cerebro to snuff out their people, nor was it rage. Fear and rage were old and familiar companions to him, but he did not believe that they were with him in that moment.

In actual fact, he felt absolutely nothing. Perhaps a there was a feeling of confirmation – unwanted, unsought, but in the final estimation undeniable. He'd known this was coming for decades, after all. So there was no sense of surprise.

He wondered briefly what Charles might have said to him, had he woke from whatever drugged daze Styker had placed him in to find that he and Erik were the only ones left. That all of the others were gone. Dead. Exterminated. What could there possibly have been to say?

Erik had prevented that from happening, but it had been too close a thing.

So he acted; he reversed the roles, and when it was all over, when he was looking down from the window of the jet on the funeral pier of mankind, the black smoke rising from the dead cities, he told himself that he was not sorry.

More to the point, Erik told himself that it was not his fault and that he was not to blame. That his hand had been forced. They had set the terms of engagement, and he had only responded in kind.

And because he didn't really believe that either, he then simply told himself that it didn't matter, that done was done, and that now there was nothing to do but discover what shape the future was to take from here.

He did not at first realize that, in ending the existence of humanity, he had also placed Mutantkind in grave peril.

**II.**

And when Mystique landed the jet to refuel, she watched Erik stagger from the plane like a reanimated corpse.

She had understood, of course, when she whispered poison into the Styker boy's ear, that what they were about to do would effectively destroy Erik. But then, they had both long ago come to terms with the concept of acceptable causalities.

Mystique had known for a long time that she was doomed and damned – had been, irrevocably, since the day she'd come into the world with blue skin. The point had been to hit back, to make them feel a little bit of the same hurt they inflicted on you before they dragged you down.

It never occurred to her that they might actually win.

She'd believed that the fighting would only end for her when she died. During the flight away from the flooded military base, she sat blinking behind the jet's controls, trying to work out what all this meant for the future. There were a thousand paths open to her now, each completely uncharted, when for decades there had been only one.

It was only when she glimpsed the green-haired girl through the terminal window that Mystique began to recognize their miscalculation.

The girl was sitting ridgedly on a bench in the terminal, among the litter of bodies. She only looked passed them with a thousand mile stare when Mystique and Erik approached her. There was, Mystique noted, at that moment a very similar look in Erik's eyes.

She was unresponsive. In the end, Mystique had to pries the Mutant girl's fingers from the dead man's hand and carry her back to the jet.

**III.**

The error, as Erik saw it, was that he had not stopped to consider what a necessity human parents were to the majority of young Mutant children.

He had, up until this point, thought about these individuals only in the terms of the almost universal damage they inflicted on those children when they actualized as Mutants. Erik's own mother had been decent, yes – she had, in fact, loved him more than her own life, and he had loved her and depended upon her love – but he had long ago realized that she was an aberration. There was little common ground between his life's work and Charles's, but one thing that they had in common was that so much of their time and effort had gone into helping Mutants whose entire sense of self had been ripped to shreds by their birth families to pull themselves back together and to learn to live with the scars.

But when Erik did what he had done, his mind could not have been further from the memory of his mother, or even from the worst examples of human parents with Mutant children. He had thought only to liberate Mutants from an existential threat, to end this game once and for all on the terms that the humans had themselves set.

Until he saw the girl sitting there alone with her dead parents, he did not realize that he had created a planet full of orphans.

IV.

Kurt Wagner understood his soul to be heavy with sin. A fraction of this taint might be bled out, exorcised with the blade of a knife, and in the past he had been able to keep things manageable in that way.

He was a creature of sin, but ultimately his greatest sin had been that of cowardice. Had he overcome his fear more quickly, had he delivered Jean into the Cerebro chamber even thirty seconds sooner, all the deaths might have been avoided. So, at it's root everything that had happened was his own fault.

Kurt's first impulse when his realization had come to him had been to cut more deeply than ever before. There was not enough blood in him to pay the debt he had run up, but he could think of no other way to even begin to fix what had happened.

It was Jean who made him stop. She had burned herself out like a phoenix bird in saving the rest of them when the dam had burst, and everyone said that she was dead and gone. Therefore, when he heard Jean's voice speaking inside his head, Kurt understood it to be the voice of an angel, and it was incumbent upon him to follow the directions of one of God's messengers.

He needed to be an angel now, too, she told him, but not in the same way that she had become an angel. Not by dying.

The world was now full of lost little lambs in desperate need of shepherds. God's children were scattered everywhere, abandoned and alone, and each of these little ones needed saving, both in body and soul.

So Kurt followed the angel's instructions, and put down the knife, and went to Xavier for guidance on what to do next.

**V.**

From inside the mansion's Cerebro unit, Charles Xavier tracked the approach of his sister. He also noted the strange girl who was with Raven, though he could glean nothing more than a low catatonic buzzing from her brain.

Charles could not tell if Erik was with them; Charles had been on Cerebro for five hours at that point, and during that time he had been unable to locate Erik, which presumably meant that he had not at any point removed his damned helmet. This was probably the only intelligent thing Erik had done in quite some time.

At that point, about ten hours had passed since Erik Lehnsherr had used him as a tool to murder roughly six and a half billion men, women and children.

He was all alone in the mansion. He had sent all of the others – even the youngest students – out into the world with coordinates from Cerebro. Right now, time was of the essence; they would have to save as much of what was left as quickly as they could.

Once, many years ago, Hank had presented Charles with an invention of his own making – a completely plastic gun which fired plastic (but, Hank had assured him, deadly) rounds. Charles had not asked for any such weapon, but he had accepted it for the sake of reassuring Hank. At the moment, the gun was sitting locked in his bank vault, so that was all the good it did him now.

Erik was there when Charles opened the door, along with Raven and the unknown girl, and Charles was astonished to find that the other man had the audacity to meet his eyes. "Charles," he said, and there was nothing in his voice or his face that Charles could read. Charles felt his lower lip curl.

He turned his head quickly to Raven, and watched her as she look right through him.

That was nothing new. Some time ago, Charles had simply ceased to matter to her, and exactly how and why this had come about remained a mystery to him. For a long time, Charles had tried to blame Erik for whatever had gone wrong between himself and his sister, had in fact accused Erik of poisoning Raven against him.

The last time they had rehashed this old argument had been less than three months earlier, when Charles had gone to visit him in his plastic prison cell. Erik had heard the accusations with a faint smirk playing at the edge of his lips, and when Charles finished Erik looked up from his hands and spoke.

"My old friend, don't you know your own sister better than that?" he'd asked. "Don't you understand that Mystique's never allowed herself to be led anywhere she didn't already want to go?"

When Erik said that, a disturbing thought had struck Charles; he had wondered for the first time how much of the Liberty Island plot – including the poisoning of Cerebro – had actually originated with Erik. He had found that it was easier to deal with the fact that his sister had been willing to hurt him that badly if he could view Raven as a pawn rather than a planner.

There had been a mockery which was almost fond in Erik's face and voice when he said this (though Charles was not sure if he himself or Raven was the source of this fondness) but there had also been exhaustion there, and something that was beaten and broken in his eyes.

Charles realized now that Stryker had by then already been torturing Erik – as to why Erik had not informed him of this was another painful mystery – but at the time Charles had looked at the bags under Erik's eyes and the shuffle that had gone into his step with sadness... but with relief as well. _He's gotten too old,_ Charles remembered thinking, _and the fight's finally gone out of him. It's over. He won't try anything else now. _

But Charles understood now that he had been wrong about that – and too much else besides. And maybe he was the one the one who'd gotten old, because he realized with a start that he'd been sitting there for quite too long a time, woolgathering.

Charles had not slept in quite a while. He wasn't at all sure if he would ever be able to sleep again.

"I can't imagine what you were thinking," he said slowly, picking out the words carefully, acid hate welling up in his throat as he spoke, "in coming here, but I want you gone immediately. We are done. I am finished with you."

And because he wanted to be understood absolutely, he turned to Raven and added, "I am finished with the both of you."

Raven said nothing, but she cocked her head at him. The thought he picked up from her then was not ambient, but rather projected at him; he was meant to hear it. _Fine. I was done with you a long time ago,_ she told him.

"You know why we're here," Erik said, which was, after all, true. "Give us what we need."

"Take the bloody helmet off," Charles told him, and Erik reached up and lifted it from his head. He tucked the helmet under one arm, and then stood up a little straighter.

Even before Charles had been in the chair, Erik had always had a way of looking down his nose on Charles when he believed that Charles was in the wrong and he was right. And infuriatingly, that was exactly what Erik was doing at this moment.

_Stiff-necked, _Charles thought disconnectedly, before he delved into Erik's mind. _That's the term for what he is. _

He felt like a swimmer forced to dive in filthy water. He withdrew from Erik's mind quickly, after only a cursory scan, perhaps sooner than he ought to have. It was the pity that repelled Charles, even more than the lack or guilt or shame that he found there, because that pity was directed not at Erik's victims, but at Charles himself. _He can't see it,_ he heard Erik think. _He can't understand why it was necessary. _

"You are pathetic," Charles told him. "And your mind is a dung heap."

Erik raised no argument against these assertions.

"I ought to simply switch your brain off," Charles said. At Erik's side, Raven tensed as though readying herself to spring. Erik lifted two fingers, and she paused then took a nimble step backwards, releasing the tension from her muscles. But her eyes tracked him like a snake contemplating its strike. He tried not to show how much that shook him.

"Except that would be too easy, wouldn't it?" Charles went on. "I should send you into a screaming, internal hell. I should make you hurt, and I should make it feel like forever."

"But you won't," Erik said, with a voice that was infuriating in its reasonableness. "At least not for the time being. You need our help."

"This is how it's going to be," Charles said, taking from his front pocket a paper which he had placed there before coming out to meet them. On the paper was written the rough location of four Mutant children under the age of two years, which Charles had found via Cerebro. "You will find these children, and then you will bring them back here immediately, and then you will go out and find more."

"Certainly," Erik said. "That was my entire intention in coming here."

"Raven will stay here," Charles went on.

She made derisive sound. "I'm not going to be your little hostage, Xavier," Raven said.

Charles was seized by an almost nostalgic urge to roll his eyes at her. Raven had always been given to posturing, but that was absurd even for her. 'Xavier' – Right, as though they hadn't shared the same last name and summer holiday and each other's secrets and everything else for almost two decades...

He did not understand how she could still be playing her games now, and he turned his head sharply toward her and snapped, "When did you become a stupid girl, Raven? I don't want a hostage, for God's sake – I need some help around here. Do you have any idea how many children are going to be coming through these doors directly?"

"My name isn't 'Raven' anymore," she said. Charles supposed she intended her voice to be defiant, but it came out sounding more or less sullen. "I've told you that already."

Charles didn't bother to answer. He turned his chair around, and wheeled back down the hallway.

Behind him, he could hear Erik and Raven arguing. "We don't have time for this," Erik told her. "Just do what he says."

Raven followed him inside.


	2. Chapter 2

**I.**

There was a certain degree of risk associated with being alone in the mansion with Raven, and Charles Xavier no longer had any confidence in his ability to assess risks.

It was true, he supposed, that he had never really understood Raven, even when they had been children together, and to what extent this lack of understanding might have had to do with his own shortcomings was a question which he had long ago been forced to abandon as ultimately useless.

Charles did not believe that she would hurt him now, but he'd been wrong about that before. The bottom line was that Raven had left zero ambiguity as to how little she concerned herself with his well-being. But it was difficult, even at this late date, for Charles to feel the same way toward her.

Aside from Raven and Erik, Charles was the only living person who really understood what had happened inside Styker's pirated version of Cerebro. Jean had known, of course, but Jean was gone, Jean had sacrificed herself in rescuing himself and the children from the flooding base. But many of his X-Men knew that Raven and Erik had been there, too, and it was only a matter of time before they recovered sufficiently from their shock to begin to fit the pieces together.

And when that happened, there would be consequences for what they had done. There would simply have to be; it was unthinkable that things could be otherwise.

Charles would not be able to protect them. More to the point, he could not say if he had the slightest desire to do so.

_I don't know my own mind any better than I do theirs,_ he thought suddenly. But something would have to happen, and he had an idea that – whatever that something was – he would have to be the one to take responsibility for it.

But for the time being, he could afford no more to focus on that then the silence of the dead or his own raw sense of betrayal.

**II.**

Mystique began to develop her first sense of what shape the immediate future would take on when Charles led her into what had been, when they were children, the mansion's ballroom. In keeping with the place's conversion into a boarding school, the room had been transformed into a gymnasium.

Pallets of supplies stood against the far wall, the towers of boxes stacked with such obsessive nearness even in the mist of crisis that Mystique understood at first glance that Cyclops had been responsible for these deliveries.

Later, when she opened the boxes, she would see that they held baby food and formula, bottles and diapers and medical supplies, clothing and cots and playpens and and even one hundred infant car seats. That was smart, the car seats; they would serve almost as well as cribs in the short term, but wouldn't take up as much room and wouldn't take nearly as much time to assemble.

"You're bringing in the infants and the small children first," she said to Charles. Not a question, though he treated it as one.

"On the main, yes," Charles said. He paused before going on. "I need to know if we're on the same page right now. Please explain to me your assessment of the situation."

"The children need to be found and taken care of," Mystique answered promptly; she and Erik had worked this all out for themselves before they'd come to the mansion. "We have to get to them as quickly as possible, or else they'll die. Especially the really small ones. You want me to organize things here."

"You'll be able to manage it?"

"I'm very good with children," she said, and pulled the green-haired girl closer to her side. The child's continued unresponsiveness worried Mystique badly, and not just for this girl specifically; she had a growing suspicion that the world might currently be full of Mutants who were reacting just as poorly to the new order of things.

Charles was looking at her as though he suspected that she'd just told him an exceedingly bad joke. "I'll take care of it," she told him. "How many are we expecting?"

"As of yesterday morning, there were 1,633 Mutants in the world. It's closer to thirteen hundred now. There plane crashes. Accidents on the roads. Mutants who died on the operating table, along with their doctors and nurses. Since... what happened... there have been several dozen suicides."

Mystique might have respected the steel in his voice more if he hadn't been struggling so hard to avoid the accusatory form with her.

"That's all there are?" she asked. Mystique had expected there to be a lot more. Ten thousand, or maybe a hundred thousand – even a million hadn't seemed impossible. She had believed that her people were everywhere. It was a disappointment to be told otherwise.

Charles didn't answer her directly. "Out of that number, roughly eighty percent are minors. More than half of that portion are under the age of five." He paused, watching her. Mystique had no idea what he was waiting for her to say, so she kept silent. "Many of the older Mutants are in a state of extreme emotional trauma at the moment, to put things bluntly. They'll need to be approached as soon as possible, but getting the small children under safe care is the chief concern, as you said. We need more adults – dependable ones, ones who can keep their heads in a crisis and who have useful skills. The rest of the Brotherhood –"

She shook her head. "Not much help there, beyond what you've already got. It was only the four of us that were left. Toad died at Liberty Island, probably; Erik thinks he drown, though if the body every washed up the government kept it under wraps." She was very careful in avoiding giving any indication that she actually cared about this. If she had, Charles might have given her his condolences – he had a tendency to do stupid things like that – and if that happened she thought there was a good chance that she would have to do something violent.

She went on. "Sabertooth is probably still alive – he's not the type to die easily – but either he's sitting in a cell somewhere or he's gone underground. I haven't been able to make contact with him, anyway."

Charles already knew exactly where Creed was, but getting him out of his cell – or rather, working out if it would be safe to let him out of said cell – wasn't high on his list of priorities at the moment. "I was thinking more specifically of Azazel. I've never been able to pin him down with Cerebro – teleporters are tricky. Do you know where he is?"

Mystique shrugged, confident that in the gesture she gave away nothing that she didn't want Charles to see. Funny how, when she'd left with Erik all those years ago, she'd believed that they were on the cusp of making a world in which no one would have cause to hide for any longer. Well, things hadn't gone the way they were supposed to, but the world was exclusively in the hands of Mutantkind now. But it was obvious at this junction that the hiding would never be over with for her. She'd gotten too good at it. "He's probably still alive," she told Charles. "If only because he's too inconsiderate to do anyone the favor of dying."

Charles pressed the point. "His aid would be invaluable, Raven. Do you have any idea where he might be...?"

"I haven't seen him in decades," she told him, deciding to let that _Raven_ pass by uncorrected. "And if you're expecting his help, I wouldn't hold my breath if I were you. Azazel's only ever helped Azazel."

**III.**

Penance didn't calculate hugely into Erik Lehnsherr's personal moral cosmology, but he thought that he ought to in the very least be able to face up to what he had done – to look at the world as it was now – without flinching away, since he had decided not to be sorry for it. It was not as difficult to do so as he might have expected.

Sometimes he thought he'd spent his entire life in training to get used to bodies, and by now he found them to be horribly unimpressive, even at this scale. But he thought that he should be feeling something when he pulled the third kid away from his mother's corpse – the parallels to his own life were rather too obvious to be ignored – even if those feelings ought not to be ones of regret or personal responsibility. Instead, he only felt numb all over. Whether that numbness was masking the elation of victory or relief that the battle was finally over or some deep self-loathing he couldn't say, but he had his suspicions.

Erik supposed that he'd probably find out sooner or later, that the numbness would have to wear off eventually.

But then, maybe he'd get lucky. Maybe he'd be dead before any of that happened.

**IV.**

Mystique knew that Charles had radioed his scouts to tell them that a ceasefire had for the time being been declared between themselves and the Brotherhood of Mutants, so she wasn't surprised that Beast didn't act especially surprised to find her in the mansion.

"What are you doing here?" he asked her when he came into the gymnasium, but it wasn't really an accusation. It was an organizational question: What's your role in managing this crisis? He had a portable bassinet in one hand. A preactualized infant, no older than two months, was sleeping in the bassinet. A small dog carrier was tucked under his over arm. Mystique couldn't see who was inside the cage, but that it was a _who_ that was in there she didn't doubt.

"I'm here to help out," she said, in case he had any doubts about that. In case he wanted her qualifications, she added, "Charles put me in charge of taking care of the kids as they're brought in."

Beast accepted that more easily than she might have expected, though maybe that was because she didn't give him a lot of time to think about it. She and Erik had not had much time to plan their strategy for dealing with the other Mutants – or rather, Erik had been unwilling to talk about that or anything else – and that made her uneasy. She couldn't guess how much – if anything – Charles might have told Beast or the others, how much they might have worked out for themselves. She felt herself to be on potentiality dangerous ground, but when she stepped forward to take the carrier from Beast he released it without objection.

However, when she set the cage on a table and moved to open the door he spoke up in caution. "Be careful – she bites." Beast pulled up the torn leg of his pants to demonstrate the truth of this claim; drying blood matted the fur of his ankle.

She bent to peer through the bars of the carrier. Coal black eyes set in a scaly, emerald green face looked back at her. Mystique saw a flash of white fangs, but she smiled back in a way that was calculated to be reassuring. "Of course she bit you," Mystique said, scolding him in a way that was more or less gentle for the sake of proving herself to the kid. In fact, she was angry enough to break Beast's arm, but there was nothing to be gained by letting either of them see that. "You locked her in a cage. She's probably scared witless."

"As a point of fact, I only found the carrier after she bit me," Beast said dryly, but Mystique ignored that information as immaterial and inadmissible. "It wasn't ideal, but I had a limited number of options and no help, and it was important that I got her here quickly.

"You've probably scared the poor thing for life," she went on. Mystique was careful to avoid looking toward the green-haired girl, sitting silently on one of the cots, when she said this; she had no intention of giving herself away that carelessly.

"I think I'm the one who should be concerned with scaring," Beast said, almost balefully, as he stared as his wounded leg. He'd picked up some pretentious regional accent somewhere along the line – it was fake, of course, but she wasn't in any position to judge others on account of their personal authenticity. She returned her attention to the kid.

When Mystique opened the carrier's door the lizard-like girl hung back instead of coming out, pressing herself against the back of the cage. From her size, Mystique didn't think that she could be much more than a year old, but those black eyes were oddly watchful and bright, and it was so hard to judge with children who were this visibly mutated.

Mystique fixed her face against showing reaction in case she was bitten, and reached into the carrier and drew the girl out. She was armored in leathery skin, and hard scales ran in ridges down her back and long the length of a thick, muscular tail. She snapped at Mystique's face when she brought her too close to it, but after all she was just a little thing, and Mystique had no difficulty keeping her at bay.

The kid was wearing a diaper, and that showed that for all her bad manners someone had made in the very least a basic attempt to take care of her, which was more than Mystique was used to expecting. Normally, kids that looked like this were abandoned or else locked away and forgotten in some dark corner, when they weren't killed outright.

She could remember finding Toad when he was only twelve or fourteen, locked in some dark basement cell so undersized that he couldn't even stand at his full height inside it. The door to the cell had rusted shut a long time before then – there was only a small porthole for passing things in and out – and she had needed to go upstairs to find a pair of wire cutters before she could let him out, and while she was there she had slipped into his parents' room and opened their throats for him, though that was something she had never felt compelled to tell Toad himself. The two of them had left through a basement window, and Mystique had needed to help him clamber up and out, because as powerful as his legs would become later, at the time his muscles were weak with atrophy.

Toad had never been right, even after she'd gotten him out. He didn't stand straight – there was a permanent curl to his spine. He ate rats and pigeons, whole and alive, as though it was a compulsion borne from years of hunger. The mossy-dirt smell of the basement never really left his skin. It was impossible to say how much of his was a manifestation of his mutation, and thus inherently good, and how much was due to the debasing effects of his long imprisonment.

But then, none of them were right, were they? It was a mark of Mutantness to be unable to tell the difference between who you were and what human society had made you into. Her own parents had tried to kill her, and so she had never been right, and Erik was if anything even worse off than she was. Even guys like Hank and Charles were fucked up, and they'd had everything that Mutants could have going for them.

But Hank – Beast – had said something, and she hadn't heard it. "What was that?" she asked.

"I asked you why you did it," he said flatly.

Mystique looked down at the clawed and scaled child, which had calmed down considerable once she'd realized she wasn't going to be able bite and scratch her way free, and her first instinct was to say, _Because of her. Because of me and Toad and Erik and all of us. Because it had to stop and now it has and I'm not sorry, I'm never going to be sorry and I don't care about the rest, because it had to stop and we made it._ But she wasn't stupid enough to give all that away, so she copied his own tonelessness to ask, "Did what?"

"Don't play stupid with me," Beast said, and now there was something of a growl in his voice. She didn't answer, and so after a while he was forced to clarify. "Charles was ill for weeks afterward. The fact of the matter is that he actually came precariously close to dying."

_He's talking about the poisoning of Cerebro, _she realized with astonishment. _He really doesn't actually have any idea... _

Honesty seemed her safest option. "That wasn't supposed to happen. The point was never to hurt him, just to keep him for interfering with the plan..."

"That's not much of an excuse."

Mystique shrugged. There was nothing to lose in telling the truth – or at least some of it – though the naivete of the person she'd been less than a year ago disgusted her now. "We thought that if we could make them – the human leadership, I mean – the same as us then they'd stop trying to hurt us. We figured anything was worth the price, if we could just make that happen." And maybe she was talking more than she should now – she'd always had a way of giving Hank more than he deserved or could be trusted with – because she added, "We thought if the plan worked, something like this could be avoided."

"Jesus, Raven. Why didn't you guys just come over here and work things out with Charles? The X-Men and the Brotherhood might have negotiated something together with the government, you could have..." but apparently he didn't know exactly what they could have done, because he didn't finish the thought. Mystique understood that he'd spent the last several years in Washington, a lobbying group of one, playing the good and tame Mutant for the human politicians. She remembered being disappointed but not really surprised when she first learned that.

What he said next was disconnected from their conversation. "The smell out there already, even from here," Beast said. "If you had the nose I have. And soon there will be rats. Disease. I don't know what's going to happen to us."

More things she and Erik hadn't considered, when they'd done what they'd done. She ignored them because she didn't know what else to do, and returned to his earlier statement. "Erik says you never sit at the negotiating table with your oppressors. He says people who do that eventually negotiate themselves into death camps. He says he's seen it happen."

"Magneto is delusional," Beast said, almost offhandedly. "He's a paranoiac."

"That might be your opinion."

"Look – I don't want to fight with you. We're too old for that, right? Or I am, anyway." He paused, lost in thought. His claws came up to scratch at the fur at the back of his neck, but when he realized what he was doing he stopped suddenly, embarrassed, and dropped his hand to his side. "I've been trying to work out just what happened... but it's hard to get my thoughts together. I think I'm in some sort of shock, actually..."

Mystique latched onto that thought to explain herself. "Everyone is," she said. "No one's acting appropriately."

"There's no way to think about what's happened out there, let along discuss it. It beggars the vocabulary. But I've been trying to work out what happened – to piece things together – and I think I have a hypothesis."

"Do you?" she said, noncommittally. Mystique had almost forgotten about the baby in her arms. She had fallen asleep against her chest.

"It started for me with a blinding pain inside my head," he said. "I thought I was having a stroke – that was the only thing that made sense at the moment."

"That happened to me, too," she said.

"It happened to all the Mutants, or at any rate to everyone I've managed to ask," Hank said. Mystique knew that, of course, but she nodded as though it wasn't obvious.

"The pain ended as suddenly as it began, but less than two minutes later the same thing started to happen to everyone else around me... but it didn't stop for them. And then they died. Everyone died."

"The humans," Mystique said. It was a correction, because _everyone_ had not died, but he didn't take it that way.

"Yes," he said, but distantly. He wasn't really talking to her now; he was just talking through his own thoughts. "I asked Scott about it. He said he wasn't completely sure, but from what Kurt had said to him, and Jean, before she died – he thought that Styker had used his son to try to kill all the Mutants, but it got switched around somehow and the humans died instead.

"So I think what happened was, basically, the kid decided to turn the tables on his old man. And here we are."

"Here we are," she agreed. "And that makes sense. That could have been what happened."

"There's a lot of pieces I'm still missing," he cautioned. "It's just a working hypothesis, maybe later I'll have time to work it out – but I need to go now. There's those kids... I don't think we're going to be able to get them all in time. Charles is triaging things – somehow, I don't know how, I don't think I could make those kinds of choices – but I don't think we'll be able to get them all in time. It doesn't take very long for an infant to die of dehydration."

"So you should go."

"Yeah." Beast started away, but he stopped in the doorway, turning his to look back at her. "Circumstances could be better, but Raven, it's good seeing you again."

"Sure," she said. It was getting difficult now to tell the lies from the truth. "You too."

**V.**

"How is this going to end?" Erik asked Charles, when he came for a second list of coordinates.

Charles couldn't imagine how the other man still had the temerity to meet his eyes, but then there wasn't much of Erik in Erik's eyes at the moment, was there? "For you or for the rest of us, Erik?"

He didn't answer. He stood rigidly, waiting.

"Erik," Charles said. "I think I'm going to have to kill you, Erik."

Was that relief that flickered across his face, through his mind? Charles thought it was, but then he'd always had difficulty reading Erik's thoughts, even without the helmet.

"That's fine," Erik said. "I won't make any objections to that. I accept that there will have to be retribution – I expected it." That was only half-true; he'd figured when he came here that he would be killed, one way or another, and probably sooner rather than later. The facts had a way of coming out, and there were a lot of people at the Institute and in the wider world who would be too blinded by their personal attachments to understand why he had needed to do what he'd done.

But he had not foreseen that Charles would draft himself for the job. _Always the martyr, _he thought, but sadly; he had not, in actual fact, wanted to cause Charles any more pain than was necessary.

"Just give me enough time to make things secure here," Erik continued. "I want to find our children and see them safe. That's all I'm asking for, Charles."

Charles went on as though Erik hadn't spoken. "I think I'm going to have to kill Raven, too," she said. "I am going to have to kill my sister. And I'm not sure that that's entirely your fault, Erik, but I hate you for it. I didn't think I had the capacity to hate anyone with much, to tell you the truth."

"Charles," Erik said, trying to keep the note of desperation out of of his voice, "be reasonable. That's not at all necessary. I'm the one to be blamed. I take complete responsibility. Raven only..."

"She only what, Erik? Only followed your orders? I don't believe that, Erik. If anything, I think the exact opposite has been true for quite some time now. And regardless, I think we've already established that that isn't a valid or acceptable defense, haven't we?"

Erik's hands hung at his sides, balled into fists, shaking. "I'm responsible," he insisted again.

"There isn't time for this now," Charles said, and held out another slip of coordinates.


	3. Chapter 3

**I.**

When Azazel did show up, a full day after the rest of Charles Xavier's old friends and opponents began to converge on the Institute as the most rational place to go in the face of such chaos, it was something of a godsend.

By then the reality of a certain incontrovertible fact had begun to creep up on Charles like slow poison, and that was simply that they weren't going to be able to save all of the children. Time and too many other barriers were lined up against them.

But having Azazel made all the difference. He achieved more in two hours than Charles's entire team had in the last twenty-four, and so – for the first time since what had happened – Charles began to feel the pressure ratchet down, if only by the slightest of degrees.

They were far from out of the woods – they were still facing a thousand different immediate crises, and the future would hold a million more. But every time he heard the low crack of air being displaced as Azazel made another return trip to the Institute, every time he felt a new young mind added to the collection that was steadily growing inside the mansion, there was a certain amount of relief involved in knowing that one more child had been saved from a death by starvation or exposure.

He didn't risk driving Azazel off with questions about his previous whereabouts or his current motives, nor did he pry too closely into the other man's mind, for fear of being noticed.

Charles skimmed along the surface of Azazel's thoughts, and found a mind that was half-feral and deeply suspicious of others, Mutant and human both. It didn't read so much as hatred as a disassociation, a disconnectedness toward the world and toward its decimated population. Ideas of heroism or an interest in the well-being of children didn't feature largely into Azazel's picture of Azazel, so far as Charles could sound out, and what exactly had brought him to the mansion remained an unanswered mystery.

In any case, Charles was grateful.

**II.**

Now, on the first day after, it seemed to Mystique that things were starting to look up.

The babies that were being brought to the mansion now arrived colicky and dehydrated, but with few exceptions none were critical. As undependable as he'd always been, Azazel clearly had a handle on the matter here and now, and was bringing in the emergency cases faster than room could be made ready for them.

Azazel didn't waste time trying to talk to her, and that much was good, but she felt him watching with those inscrutable pale blue eyes, and understood that sooner or later something would happen.

Charles had pulled the younger students off what had somehow come to be called "retrieval duty" (a bit of terminology which stunk of Cyclops as much as the neatly ordered mountains of supplies had) once it became obvious that Azazel probably wasn't going to skip out with the job half finished. Charles didn't exactly discuss these things with Mystique, but he obviously felt that being outside the mansion's grounds at this point was bad for their mental well-being, so he's given them over to Mystique to help with the care of the same children.

There were by then several hundred infants and toddlers in various rooms of the mansion, and more coming via Azazel every quarter hour, but only a few dozen caretakers of varying degrees of competency. None of which had slept over the course of the last day and a half.

It wasn't sustainable. Soon they would need to start bringing in more adults and older children just to be able to provide a marginally acceptable level of care to the younger ones. But Charles said he understood that, and would see to it as soon as possible.

Charles was doing a good job, surprisingly enough, of keeping things together. Turned out he wasn't entirely useless, at least not for this type of thing.

Mystique had begun to worry that they'd doomed entirely too many young Mutants along with the humans when they'd done what they had done, but things were looking up now. The sense of dread which had first gripped her when she'd seen the green-haired girl sitting alone among the bodies at the airport was starting to fade, replaced by a confidence in the future and their ability to handle it.

Even the green-haired girl was doing better. The day before, Mystique had put a bottle and a fluffy infant the color of a baby duckling in her arms, and that had been enough to raise the girl from her stupor, if not to help her relocate her voice. Today, the girl was speaking – if not directly to Mystique then at least to some of the smaller children – and that was a relief. She felt personally responsible for all of them, but the green-haired girl specifically stood out in her mind.

Mystique took her progress as a sign that things might still turn out okay.

**III.**

Everyone told Kurt Wagner that he was a Mutant – even the voice of Jean who had become an angel inside his head insisted on that – so Kurt supposed that it would be petulant to continue continue to argue the point. He'd conceived of himself as something demonic for most of his formative years – as a creature of a fundamentally evil nature, though, hopefully and through God's grace, not entirely without hope of redemption – and it hard to change that picture now.

Harder, when a red-skinned man who bore an uncanny resemblance to the Devil came on the scene, delivering children into their care in bursts of sulfuric smoke. Kurt had been too panicked, the first time he saw the man, to even speak, but when he had gone with another cloud of smoke – so like the ones Kurt himself produced when he transported – he'd turned to Mystique out of desperation and asked, "Is he –"

"No," Mystique said, cutting him off sharply before he could finish the question. "He's just a Mutant, same as the rest of us."

They had been working together in the same room for several hours now, and Kurt had noticed that she had a way of looking past or around rather than at him. He did not think it had anything to do with the way he looked, because the only other Mutant he'd seen Mystique act that way toward – Charles Xavier – was normal in appearance. She looked at him now, though – piercingly. "Azazel is a Mutant, but he's not safe. Don't trust him. Don't believe anything he tells you."

Mystique had a way of acting like he'd disappointed her, but Kurt could never get a handle on what it was that he'd done or why she took whatever it was so personally. "He – Azazel – is helping us to save the Mutant children," Kurt said tentatively. "So he can't be all bad, right?"

"Why would you say 'Mutant children?'" she demanded.

"I'm sorry... I don't understand the question."

"It's redundant. Now all children are Mutants. There's no need to make a distinction."

"My English is pretty basic..." Kurt began in way of apology.

"It's not your English that's the problem – it's your way of thinking."

And she walked away.

In the coming days, Kurt would begin to notice that Azazel watching him intently. Kurt felt as though the other man was taking his measure, sizing him up. It seemed to Kurt that he had been found lacking in some fundamental way, though he could not have explained how he knew this.

He wondered if they were siblings or in some other way linked – it was hard to ignore the commonalities in their abilities and their tails – but whether or not he was a demon, the red man was imposing, and Kurt didn't dare to approach him.

Jean was silent on the matter.

**IV.**

Sometime near evening, Erik drew Mystique aside. "You need to start planning for eventualities," he told her. "Charles intends to kill you."

Mystique looked at him dubiously for several seconds, as though she couldn't decide if he was joking or not. Then she laughed. "No, he doesn't," she said. "Don't act stupid."

Had Erik been a different type of man he might have slapped her. Mystique had managed to take charge of the situation with the orphans competently and effectively, but in everything else – and especially in dealing with Charles – she had for the last two days been acting exactly like a fourteen year old.

There was something wrong with her, he understood that – there was something wrong with all of them right now, they were all in shock and they were all acting strangely – but whatever it was had to stop now.

"Listen to me!" Erik snapped, and – infuriatingly – she rolled her eyes. "You need to leave tonight, after dark, and I want you to take the helmet with you – they won't be able to find you as long as you keep it on."

"Yeah? And what about you?"

"I'm going to stay here for the time being," he said quickly, trying to steamroll over the question. He ignored the smirk and divisive sound she made at that. "The HQ in Canada would be your best bet –"

"Does Canada still exist? I mean as an idea. If the government of Canada is dead and gone, is there still any Canada, or is it just a nonspecific collection of rocks and trees and water?"

"I wish I understood what the fuck was the matter with you right now, Raven."

"What's wrong with _me_? Do you even hear yourself right now? You aren't making any sense. I'm supposed to go to the base in Canada, and I'm supposed to take the helmet so they can't find me on Cerebro. And you're just going to stay here, helmetless and with the knowledge of where I've gone rolling around inside your head. Think about that for about that for a minute, and get back to me when you figure out why it's a really stupid plan."

_Fuck,_ he thought. _I'm falling apart. _"Go wherever, then. It doesn't matter where you do." And he said again, because she simply didn't seem to _get it_, "Charles wants to kill you."

"Well, maybe he does, and I guess it's the thought that counts. But he won't."

"Raven –"

"No, you listen to me now. I know him better than you do, and I'm telling you that Charles isn't capable of killing anyone. Not for any reason. He doesn't have it in him. Period. Full stop. End of story. So stop worrying about it, we've got more important things to deal with.

"And please don't think I can't see right through you, Erik. He isn't going to kill you either, so stop thinking you're going to get away that easily. You need to get your shit together. We need you, Erik. There's too much work to do here for you to die."

"Raven –" he started again.

"Nope. Conversation's over." And she walked away.

**V. **

Mystique had gone out of her away to avoid anything approaching a conversation with Azazel since he had arrived at the mansion. But when the teleporter wanted to find you it was difficult to avoid him; he had a way of imposing himself in her life, whether she wanted him there or not.

Mystique was on her way to bed when he cornered her in a corridor, having by then been awake for well over forty-eight hours. It was the first time in almost two days that she was not surrounded on all sides by Mutantkind, and so it was obvious that he had been waiting for a chance to get her alone.

Before yesterday, it had been nearly thirty years since she'd last seen him, but Azazel had aged no more than she had. She stared him up and down, trying to hide how worn down she felt; it wasn't good to show weakness to Azazel.

"He is yours?" Azazel asked, without preamble. His English had never been good, but over the last few decades it had become markedly worse.

Mystique wondered where he'd been hiding himself all these years. He had not been helping the Brotherhood, in any case, even when they needed him most. Azazel had played his games, and he'd gotten what he was after, and then he'd abandoned her – had abandoned the Brotherhood – without ever looking back.

"The blue one," he added, when she didn't answer. "Is your boy, da?"

Mystique understood the question perfectly – had, in fact, known what he would ask before he'd even spoken. But she said, "You'll have to be more specific." By then, after all, there were no fewer than sixteen children in varying shades of blue within the mansion's walls; blue appeared to be a common aspect of many mutations.

He scowled at her. Had there really been a time when she'd found that impressive – even sexy? The stupidities of youth.

"The German," Azazel said, and after a long moment's thought he managed to dredged up from what past with him as a brain the Mutant's name. "Wagner."

There was no reason for Azazel to even wonder – let alone ask – if Nightcrawler was his. That much was obvious at first glance. Even the boy seemed to have figured out that the two of them were in some way connected, and from what Mystique had seen he was no brighter than his father.

That was one mistake she sure as hell wasn't going to own up to now. Not even Erik knew about that little debacle, and things were going to stay that way if she had anything to do about it.

"_Nyet_," she said, lying in his own voice. That seemed apt, though she supposed Erik would say that it was a sign of her ugly sense of humor. "You must have gotten him off one of your other whores. I don't have anything to do with him."

She slid around him and went into the nearest empty guest room, closing the door behind him pointedly.

Well, maybe Azazel wasn't completely stupid; at some point over the last three decades he'd finally learned what a locked door meant. He didn't bother her anymore.

**VI.**

This was the truth, and Charles Xavier understood that he no longer had the luxury to deny it: He had sensed the potentiality for something like this in Erik for a long time – yes, right from the very beginning.

But it was a potentiality that Erik himself had been well aware of, and toward which Erik had always felt a great and soul-deep aversion. Charles had gambled on the belief that Erik understood himself well enough to be able to hold those dark impulses in check, and for decades he had managed to do exactly that.

There had been violent episodes – that was undeniable – but they had always been aimed directly at individual humans who had done harm to Mutants. And Erik's rhetoric had gotten harsher over the years – less forgiving, if that was even possible – especially when he was embracing the persona of Magneto, but rhetoric was only words, and Charles knew very well how rarely people truly believed what they said.

He recognized now what he had known but not taken seriously at the time; that Erik had been slipping – yes, ever since Senator Kelley had begun to push for the Mutant Registration Act Erik had been slipping closer and closer to the edge of an abyss which he had skirted so carefully for so many years.

Charles had been aware of the fact – if not the degree – of Erik's worsening mental state, had recognized that his behavior had become increasingly erratic over the last two years. But he had believed that the situation would normalize after the fuss that Kelley had been stirring up burned itself out. Charles had friends in Washington, and he was fairly confident that Kelley's bill would die on the Senate floor. Even if it didn't, there were other routes of legal recourse opened to them.

He'd told Erik as much when the entire controversy began, but Erik had only looked at him as though Charles had just by his words delegitimized everything Charles had ever been and everything they had ever shared together. And then he had simply walked away.

Erik was difficult to deal with when he was angry, and he was angry most of the time. But Erik had always had control over that anger, rather than the other way around. He held it in check when it was in his interests to do so, and bent it to his will, and used it to carry himself and his followers forward.

But fear was an entirely different matter, and Erik was at his most dangerous when he felt afraid. When he was backed into a corner, when he or his were under attack – real or imagined – he was capable of absolutely anything.

And now they were living the result of that, those of them who were still alive.

Charles wondered now why he had not seen this coming sooner, and he wondered to what degree his failure to do so left him responsible for what had happened. For too many years he'd made excuses for Erik and Raven both, covering for them, protecting them (though they were more likely to frame his actions as 'meddling') and this was what had come of it.

_I'm still making excuses for them,_ he realized, with an amazed sort of self-disgust. _It has to stop. I need to..._

But the days bled into weeks, and he didn't.


	4. Chapter 4

**I.**

More than a week after it all began – or else, ended – the fact that Kurt Wagner had been reporting to the others that he was hearing voices – specifically, Jeans's voice – was finally brought to Charles Xavier's attention.

Kurt had made no secret of this – he had in fact informed nearly every person he came into contact with of the advice and support with which "Jean" had been supplying him, but Charles had spent the majority of the week glued to Cerebro, and thus had missed these conversations. And because Kurt had said several things before the disaster which placed his mental health in doubt, no one had taken his claims seriously enough to spend Charles's time on it.

When it was finally brought to his attention, Charles took Kurt to his office and – immediately after receiving Kurt's consent to do so – scanned through every metaphorical inch of the other man's mind.

But if Jean had ever really been there – if she had found some way, at the moment of death, to piggyback her consciousness onto Kurt's brain – she was gone now. She existed inside Kurt's mind only as a few brief but fond memories.

_Stupid to have gotten my hopes up._ But it felt to Charles like he'd lost Jean a second time.

Kurt saw the hurt and disappointment etch itself more deeply into Charles's face. "Try not to be too sad, now. She's only gone on to Heaven. You'll see her again someday."

Charles sighed exhaustedly but bit back what he wanted to say to that; none of this, after all, was Kurt's fault, and it would be cruel to try to take his hope away from him.

He went on to question Kurt as to exactly what "Jean" had told him. She had, Kurt explained, forgiven him for his cowardice, had counseled him against suicide, and offered him a route to redemption by working to save the lost children. He could tell Charles nothing which only Jean might have known. Jean had been as confirmed an atheist as Charles, but Kurt's "Jean" spoke of Heaven and God in saintified cliches which sounded nothing like her.

There was nothing to the story that Kurt couldn't have invented for himself as a way of cooping with the crisis. Eventually, Charles had to accept that this was exactly what had happened. Jean had been kind to Kurt, and that had left a strong impression on him because it was something that he had experienced only too rarely in his life. When she'd died, Kurt had constructed a fantasy which allowed him to survive the guilt and stress and shock of having lived though the end of the world as they'd known it.

That Kurt was not well put together mentally was something that Charles could not have failed to notice while working his way through his mind. But the other man had found some way to make it through the last week without breaking down, and Charles had to admire that, as disappointed as he was about Jean.

Kurt might well have been one of the least sane adults in the Institute, but Charles thought he might make it through okay still. Which was more than Charles could say for a lot of the others, himself included.

**II.**

Charles Xavier jerked backwards in his wheelchair when Azazel appeared on the bridge, and a sound that was one part pain and two parts surprise hissed through his lips. Azazel had sense that he'd interrupted something, that perhaps his appearance inside this strange metal-lined dome had inferred with the connection between the telepath's brain and the Cerebro machine.

He'd been in here once before, some days earlier – he couldn't remember how many, exactly, as they had a way of bleeding together for him – and Xavier had explained the purpose of Cerebro to him. "I don't need machine to find people," he had informed the old man, pleased as always to his core with himself and his abilities.

The old man was looking much older today, as though ten years had gone by rather than a handful of days. The same was true, Azazel had noted, of Magneto. What was left of those two had been worn ragged by recent events, and it seemed to Azazel that neither one was long for this world.

"I am leaving now," Azazel told him.

"I'm sorry to hear that," Xavier said. "But I can't make you stay."

"You can't," Azazel agreed. "It's too loud here. There is too much gnashing of teeth and crying children. It's tedious."

"Well, I need to thank you for helping us in the first place," Xavier said. He was watching Azazel with a strange expression. "You didn't have to come."

"No," Azazel agreed again. "I didn't."

Xavier seemed to consider his next words carefully. "May I ask you why you did? Help us, I mean. Raven didn't think you would help us."

Azazel pulled a face at the mention of Mystique. Xavier smiled at that, though wanly. "Your sister is tediously one-dimensional for person who can be anyone," Azazel told him. "She is always aggrieved. Always, someone had treated her badly, or abandoned her, or somehow made of her a victim, no matter what. It's easier to fulfill her expectations then to convince her she is mistaken.

"Why should I not come here? Does Mystique say to you that I so bad that I leave Mutant children to starve, when it is no trouble for me to come?" He blew a lock of hair out of his eyes. "She's worse than I am.

"And in any case, I wanted to learn what happened. But the people here only have guesses, and there is no understanding of what happened. No one can say who caused this, and how or why. So now I am bored with it, and I am going."

Xavier raised a hand. "One more question – please?"

Azazel waited.

"What would you do if you knew who made this happen?"

Azazel shrugged. "I never think that far ahead. Maybe I have celebration drink with him. Maybe I cut his throat instead. It's hard to say, isn't it?"

"How do you mean?"

"I don't know what this means for me. Things always changing, of course, but this is such a _big_ change. The old world is gone completely, and I never loved it, but..."

"But what now?"

Azazel nodded.

And then he went.

**III.**

"Haven't seen you in a while," Erik heard Mystique say, as she slid down onto the bench beside him.

Erik lifted his head to look at her, and saw something like shock ripple across her features, quickly concealed. He supposed he understood that; he probably looked a fright, after all. "I've been busy," he said, more as an excuse for his haggard appearance than his absence.

"Who hasn't been? But Jesus, Erik, have you slept at all? You look like hell warmed over."

"There have been things that needed done. I had to float the mobiles in," he said, nodding at the neat rows of R.V.s and trailer homes and modular classrooms that had sprouted within the the mansion's grounds. Even after Scott, Ororo, Hank and Logan had relocated with a hundred and fifty Mutants a piece – better not to put all their eyes in one basket, should the mansion be struck by plague or natural disaster – there still hadn't been enough room in the mansion for everyone, hence the improvisation. "Then we had to do the electrical and plumbing hooks ups.

"Then the power went out –"

"I know about that," Mystique said. That had been a difficult fourteen hours; she and her crew had needed to improvise with the mansion's fireplaces just to get bottles warmed up. Kitty Pryde had managed to give herself a pretty nasty burn, the little idiot.

"So we had to set up the generators and, ultimately, figure out what was wrong at the power station."

"You got a handle on it, though?"

"Oh yes, for the time being, anyway. But we realized we needed to shut down most of the grid, or there would only be more fires – half of Westchester's burned down, you know. People had their ovens or their irons and so on turned on when it happened, and then they were never turned off..."

"I've seen the smoke. Westchester was just a pretentious joke, anyway – it's no big loss."

Erik frown, trying to keep the edges of his fraying temper together. "The problem is, Raven, that this is a problem everywhere. Not to mention the nuclear plants, oil ridges and dams and a thousand other things that can go bad if no one's looking after them... And you might not approve of Westchester, but if the supermarkets all burn down we're going to have to go to a that much more trouble to restock on supplies. If we lost the power plant – or the sewage plant – we might have to relocate completely, I don't know..."

"Okay," Mystique said. He could tell that she wanted him to stop talking, that he was somehow making her extremely nervous, but he didn't much care.

"Between all that, I've been clearing the roads – lot of cars and trucks in the way, you know? So I –"

"Wait, why have you started clearing the roads now?" Hank had wanted everyone to stay out of the cities to the greatest extent possible, until the risk for disease had decreased. It was a problem that would eventual resolve itself, once the bodies had rotten away to bones, though Hank hadn't put things in such stark terms, but for right now everyone was safer if they stayed behind the walls of the mansion's grounds unless it was absolutely necessary. Mystique herself hadn't left once.

"Because of the workers for the power plant," Erik said. Was he explaining things badly, or was she simply not listening? Erik couldn't tell. "They have to get through to drive back and forth to the plant..."

"Why can't they go in one of the jets?" Mystique demanded.

Erik waved that away. "That's not sensible –"

"No, what you're doing right now is what's not _sensible_. Are you trying to work yourself into an early grave, old man?"

_Oh probably,_ Erik thought. "You're not my mother, Mystique. I don't need you to tell me..." But a group of kids was drawing close, so Erik bit back what he might have said. "Let's not argue in front of the children, alright?"

There were eight or ten of them, girls and boys both, and most of the older ones lead toddler by the hand or carried smaller children. Erik watched them covertly as they passed by, trying to decide how badly they had been damaged, though he knew very well that that wasn't really something you could tell by looking.

They were a world unto themselves, those children, and though some glanced briefly at Mystique – physical mutations still being a novelty to many – they didn't break stride or lose the thread of their private conversations. It was only after the group had passed by that one of the girls paused, peeling off from the rest of the group and turning around to look back at Mystique and Erik. The others went on, seemingly oblivious to the fact that they'd lost one of their number.

The girl stood staring at them, her head cocked to the side, her expression something between curiosity and confusion. Then she started back toward them.

"Do you recognize her?" Erik asked Mystique softly.

"No."

The girl stopped in front of the bench, a few feet off. She was dark-haired and slim, maybe twelve years old. When she spoke Erik noted that the accent was British, extremely posh and upperclass, and somehow precocious in a girl that young. "How do you do?" she asked Erik.

"Very well, thank you," Erik said, trying to make it sound believable. "And you?"

The girl lifted her chin. "As well as can be expected, given the circumstances," she said primly.

"Of course," Erik said, dropping his eyes.

"But one must put on a strong face, for the sake of the children," she went on.

"Of course," Erik said again, studying the girl with new eyes. "What's your name, my dear?"

"Oh, how terribly rude of me. I'm Betsy."

"Charmed," Erik told her. "I am Magneto." He nodded toward Raven. "This is Mystique."

"I know," Betsy said.

Erik smiled, turning to look at Raven. "Our reputations precede us," said.

He turned back to the girl, leaning forward on the bench to come eye-level with her. "Betsy," he repeated. "That's very cute, Betsy, but what's your _real _name?"

"Elizabeth Braddock," she corrected.

"You don't understand the question," Mystique cut in. "He's not asking you for your slave name, for the name the humans gave you. All of that's in the past now. He's asking you for your real name – the name you chose for yourself when you realized who you were."

"Oh, I understand now," Betsy replied. "You mean a code name. I think all of that's a bit silly, honestly."

"It takes a little getting used to," agreed Erik, who had never actually managed to think of himself as 'Magneto' – at least not consistently. "But it's important that you try."

"Well... I _have_ been thinking about it, and I rather fancy Psylocke," she admitted. "Is that good?"

"That's very good," Erik said. "Now tell me, Psylocke, what is it that you can do?"

"Oh. I read minds," Betsy said, something shifting subtly in her tone. She had been grave before, but now there was unmistakable danger in her voice.

She turned to Mystique. "I thought I caught something... alarming... in your thoughts a few minutes ago. But I can't quite seem to find it again. You have a very slippery mind, you know."

"Hasn't anyone ever told you that it's bad manners to go poking around in someone else's head without permission?" Mystique demanded. She was trying to sound angry, but even Erik could hear the panic fluttering below the surface, so he supposed she was not fooling the telepath.

Betsy didn't bother to answer her. She looked back to Erik. "On the other hand, you're so exhausted that you don't seem to have any barriers left. Your waking dreams are bleeding right out of your head. You have the worst selection of nightmares I've ever seen – it's no wonder that you don't sleep."

"Is that so?" Erik looked around quickly. A minute ago there had been at least twenty other people within his line of sight, counting the band of children (and wasn't it strange, he realized suddenly, that no one in Betsy's group had asked her why she had stopped following along with the others?) but now they seemed to be completely alone – just the three of them. There wasn't even any point in asking the girl if that was her doing. "And what else have you discovered?"

"Everything," the girl said.

"That's it," Mystique said, standing quickly. "I'm done. I'm out of here."

She started to walk away – back toward the mansion – but Betsy said, "Yes, I quite agree. You are done," and Mystique crumpled to the ground mid-stride.

It took Erik a few moments to realize that she was dead. He supposed that he ought to have felt something more when that realization hit him, but that thick sense of numbness was on him again, as all-encompassing as a death shroud, and all he felt at the moment was a soul-deep desire to be on the ground beside Mystique, asleep.

_All in good time, _he supposed. It was difficult to take his eyes off the body, but he looked back to the girl.

"I understand why you did that," he told told her. "But you shouldn't have done it. That sort of thing ought to be left to adults – you could damage yourself in ways that can't be fixed, a child like you doing things like that."

"I think I'm going to keep being Betsy," the girl said. "At least until I'm old enough to be Elizabeth. I like that name. My parents gave it to me." She paused, thoughtful. "I miss them quite a lot, you know."

"I understand that."

"I know you do. You lost your mother at almost exactly the same age as I am now, so of course you understand perfectly. And that's also why you understand why I need to kill you now."

"Yes," Erik said. "I just want you to know –"

"I already do," she said, but Erik pressed on.

"– that everything we did was for people like you. We did it so Mutants could have a future."

"I do understand that. But it was still wrong, no matter what your motives or reasons were, and that's why you can't have any part in our future, whatever form it takes."

"It would be obscene to make excuses for what we did. I won't insult you in that way."

"You already have made excuses, but I appreciate what you're trying to say. Are you ready?"

Erik nodded. But that seemed insufficient, so he added, "I am."

And that was the last thing he ever said.

Elizabeth Braddock contemplated the bodies for a long moment. Then she turned away and headed back toward the mansion, the future walking on, unflinching, and without looking back.


End file.
